Religion Dispatches
…itted same-sex couples to prepare to complete marriage license paperwork. “Today justice won out,” said Samuel M. Chu, Executive Director of California Faith for Equality. “Today’s decision by US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to overturn Prop 8 and lift the stay on same gender marriages in the state of California on August 18th is a giant step toward equality. “The Supreme Court has affirmed that marriage is a fundamental right. Justice Walke…
Read More…l I wrote a longer commentary here on Tom Geoghegan’s apt observation that today’s bankers aren’t like the bankers of old who actually wanted to see loans repaid. Peter Goodman’s report today confirms yet again that we are in a bold new era of usury that no amount of windowdressing can fully conceal. The business pages this week have been filled with silly stories on tiny signs of life in the housing market, whereas the big story—the millions of d…
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…the forces of light must now preserve civilization itself. In the face of today’s problems—“financial crisis, decline of our values, the deterioration of the family, rampant greed and materialism… terror and war”—the only way to overcome our “hopelessness” and “fear” is to “return to the values and principles that define us. The Jewish Jesus I have laid out before you embodies these Judeo-Christian values.” In Boteach’s Rohrschach test, the Jews,…
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…power and influence of protestant liberalism has all but died. In America today, liberal Protestantism exists in a persistent vegetative state. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent resignation of Dr. Brad Braxton, the now ex-pastor of Riverside Church, NYC. Dr. Braxton’s resignation, after a controversial nine months, is symptomatic of a deep theological and ethnic dilemma among progressive Christians. This dilemma, which is spelled ou…
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…with state-sponsored heterosexuality. Remember canon law to common law to… today’s law. So, among the tax resisters today might be many members of gay, lesbian, and other communities. In 2008, for example, Melissa Etheridge publicly stated that she would refuse to pay a portion of her California taxes as a result of Proposition 8’s passage. And that spring, in 2009, there was a raft of protests at various post offices on April 15. This year, other…
Read More…n’t seem to realize that the kinds of same-sex relations that are going on today are not like same-sex relations at other times in human history. There were always people of the same sex having sexual relations, but today there are new claims. It’s like our proposals for more equality in marriage over and against the patriarchal marriage of the past. Same-sex couples are making claims as families and asking for thing like marriage. Same-sex Muslim…
Read More…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…
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…nt power that its existence would be absolutely assured. Most Israeli Jews today, haunted by the same fear of powerlessness, still cannot believe in that assurance. People who are so preoccupied with their security—constantly on the alert for attackers, always fearing they might be “pushed into the sea,” feeling that their country is and must remain a psychological fortress—can hardly live a really normal life. Therefore, when judged by its own st…
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…tian lives saved by this groundbreaking book,” comments Christian Feminism Today on its website. An earlier book, Women, Men, and the Bible, attracted widespread attention in 1977, giving hope to women raised in conservative denominations that required women’s submission to men. Mollenkott spoke at two of the first conferences of evangelical feminists: one in 1973 at Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver and another in 1975 to the newly founded E…
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…favor of Darwinism, psychology, and comparative religions. The majority of today’s religious “nones”—those who claim no religion but still embrace spirituality—are engaged in the same task of renovating their faith for a new historical moment. And typically, they draw from this same liberal religious toolkit. Today’s unaffiliated, like the liberals of previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that is practical, psych…
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